


Bright Images

by Fairleigh



Category: Sharp Objects - All Media Types, Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn
Genre: Dark, Future Fic, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Moral Ambiguity, Social Media
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-05 04:46:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16803913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fairleigh/pseuds/Fairleigh
Summary: Amma is killing again. Although I know it to be true, I can’t prove it. Not yet.





	Bright Images

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LittleRaven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/gifts).



Amma is killing again. Although I know it to be true, I can’t prove it. Not yet.

I haven’t been back to Wind Gap for thirteen years. As I drive through the center of town, I am immediately struck by how everything seems unaccountably older, shabbier, and covered in Make America Great Again signs.

The house, though, is exactly as I remember it. The upholstery, the wallpaper, the furniture, even the placement of the bone china vases and their seasonally appropriate sprays of fresh flowers — all scrupulously correct, a veritable mausoleum and monument to Adora.

I ascend the stairs slowly, deliberately, taking the steps two at a time where I know the treads creak. My bedroom and Marian’s have both been closed off, locked and sealed, airtight tombs to warehouse the ghosts of the dearly departed.

I ignore Alan’s room. Technically, he’s the man of the house, but he doesn’t matter. Not to me. Certainly not to his erstwhile adult daughter. He might as well not be here at all.

Amma’s bedroom is where the transformation has occurred. The bed is the same, but it has been pushed off into a far corner. The remaining two thirds of the space has become a top of the line home photography studio. I take in the all-purpose neutral backdrop, the constant and strobe lighting fixtures, the softbox, the digital camera bolted to a tripod.

So, this is where it happens, I think silently. This is how she kills them.

~*~*~

Amma was thirteen years old the first time she killed. The year was 2005, and social media as we know it today was just getting started. Hell, most people couldn’t even get a Facebook account until it was opened to the general public in 2006.

She was released from juvenile detention in 2010, on her eighteenth birthday. Really, anyone else who’d done what she’d done would’ve been kept locked up longer — _she_ should have been kept locked up longer — but Alan hired the best lawyers, and let’s face it, the wealthy have always been more equal than others.

2010 was the year that Instagram launched its photo- and video-sharing app.

I’m partly to blame; in the beginning, I encouraged her. I’d just accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and was therefore working full-time in Evanston. Amma, meanwhile, had insisted upon returning to Adora’s house after her release. Making regular visits to Wind Gap wasn’t feasible for me. Social media is what kept us in touch.

And I was spying. Yes, I admit it. Amma had hurt girls she’d once considered friends, so I did my best to keep tabs on whom she befriended online.

She became popular, of course, and she made a lot of friends quickly, friends who hung on her every word when it came to topics like fashion, beauty, and culture. As for me, well, the tenure track kept me busier than I would have preferred. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention. Then Amma became one of those Instagram Influencers, with an advertising revenue stream and close to a million followers, and keeping up with Ms. Amity Adora Crellin became a lost cause.

I blame myself; I can’t help it.

~*~*~

“Camille!” Amma exclaims. “You didn’t tell me you planned to visit!”

She is wearing a traditional Korean hanbok. The jacket is ivory silk, and the skirt is a swirling, voluminous, floor-length fall of burgundy. Like dried blood. Like Amma is sinking into a sea of it. Her smiling, rosy-cheeked face and her strong, long-fingered hands are the only parts of her perfect skin the hanbok doesn’t conceal.

I shrug, feigning nonchalance, and loiter on the threshold.

~*~*~

We thought it would bring us closer together. We thought it would foster frictionless communication and global understanding. _I_ thought that at first. Some of my optimistic colleagues at Northwestern still do.

But then the ever-updating feeds began to distract us, and the instant gratification of likes and comments became an addiction. The flip side of the repeated high of mediated social interaction was the anxiety of commensuration. We measure our self-worth by comparing the number of likes we receive to the number of likes received by others, and no matter how popular we are, how often we are given digital proof we are liked, it is never enough to satisfy us.

The worst is the shunning, the bullying, the trolling. As a journalist, I have written about teen girls who have been driven to attempt suicide by the adverse treatment they experience online. I have written about some who have succeeded. Their parents and teachers can’t understand why they just didn’t unplug, disconnect, log off, when things started to go bad. What they don’t understand — but I do — is that these girls _can’t_. Online is where their friends are, their classmates, their communities of choice. You can’t take yourself away from the world and live, and social media _is_ the world —

 _One that we construct and order according to what we have been taught._ Pain always begets more pain. Is it any surprise that this world also hurts us?

Amma is savvy. She does not shun or bully or troll. But she has been nursed from the breast of false, bright images. She need only be online as Adora made her, the feminine made falsely perfect, and weave a disingenuous promise of perfectibility on the web to her adoring Instagram followers.

As for the girls? They see Amma and despair, and they kill themselves.

~*~*~

“Well, whatever.” She forgives my minor breach of etiquette. “Your timing is perfect; I’m in the middle of a shoot. Would you like to try the modern hanbok? It’s your size, and I think it’d look great on you. It’s to be a sponsored post on my Instagram. You can be the model. You’re already famous — they’ll _love_ you.”

Amma gestures in the direction of a garment hanging on a nearby peg. It’s like a skimpy, miniature version of the hanbok she’s wearing. The colors and fabrics are the same, but it’s little more than a sash and a short skirt. I recoil inwardly. Wearing an outfit like that is hardly better than being naked and clothed in my scars … and Amma relishes that.

She said her followers will love me. Why must love hurt, I wonder?

“We can show them, Camille. You’re a survivor; you should be proud.”

“I know,” I tell her flatly. This is meant as a change of subject, not agreement, and I make that abundantly clear with my abrupt tone. I see no reason to beat around the bush.

“What do you know?” Amma’s expression is blank, schooled nonchalance, but she’s not stupid, and there’s no fooling me. She knows I know what she’s been doing to those girls. She looks so much like Adora, I realize, my skin pulsing.

“Enough,” I say. Do I mean it as a reply or an entreaty?

“No.” Amma proffers the hanbok on its hanger. I take it automatically. “Come on. They’ll _love_ you,” she says.

No court of law would convict her for these new crimes, no matter how lurid and heinous they truly are, even if I could prove the causation beyond a reasonable doubt. Yes, I understand that. So? So what? There must be alternative remedies. Will … will showing the world my pain yet again make a difference, I ask myself? Will it save the life of even one girl who thought she was alone until she sees me? If so, I’ll do it. But I can no longer live in hope.

I don the hanbok anyway. All of the words on my skin are screaming, a cacophony. I sit down in front of the camera.

“It’s never enough, you know,” Amma remarks as she adjusts the position of the lighting around me. It's blindingly bright. “People think I’m lucky to be so popular, but you have to keep on producing new content if you want to _stay_ popular. Once you start, you can’t ever stop, you know? It’s like feeding the gaping maw of a beast that never stops being hungry.”

“Alright,” I say and close my eyes. The lights were making them ache. “Let’s feed the beast.”


End file.
